Illustration Process for my Tribal Penguin

Hi Everyone & Happy Friday!

in this post I will share in detail from start to finish my Penguin illustration process.

First of I trace my penguin and all it's tiny details in pencil, once I am done I grab my Rotring Rapidograph pens and retrace the whole illustration with care, patience and attention to all my fine line details steady pulse is a must here! I use tips 0.1, 0.2 and 0.4 mostly.

Once I have retraced all the outlines with my pen I scan it and save a copy for adding color later in Adobe Illustrator.

I then move on to doing my black and white version by starting to fill in the shapes and spaces with black ink.

Once it feels like it's done, again I scan it and save this version, which will be my final black and white version.

Moving on to color. I upload my 1st outlined scanned version to Adobe Photoshop first to clean it up.
I end up re-tracing and re-drawing the whole illustration practically all over again. I am a big perfectionist and I want my lines to be as clean and accurate as possible, I currently do not have a great scanner yet so this is why I have to re-trace some parts again on Photoshop, double the work, double the fun! And yes, patience lots of patience, but when doing something you love the extra work does not really matter.
By the way I work with a Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet and am saving up to get the Wacom Cintiq which would allow me to draw directly to the screen and convert my illustration traces straight to vector lines and save me all this cleaning up process.

Ok by now I have my cleaned up version ready for Adobe Illustrator for the fun color adding part!
I open my .jpg or .png version on Adobe Illustrator and use the "Live Trace" tool adjusting the settings to the one that will go best to my design, to convert all my lines to vectors. works like magic!

I then select my color palettes to proceed with color adding. There are a few ways of adding colors, my favorite one is the "Live Paint Bucket". I select my color per area and then live paint one by one by sections.

I keep going, one by one until I fill in each space accordingly to my chosen color palette.

And Voila! this Little guy is done :)

The above version is called "Ethnic Penguin" my black and white version ended up looking like the one below and I named it "Tribal Penguin"

Here are some products you can find in my Society6 Shop

 Thanks for stopping by and taking yourself the time to read my post! If you have any questions or thoughts please shoot me an e-mail at pamelagallegos@pomgraphicdesign.com

Please Visit my Society6 Shop Here:

http://society6.com/pomgraphicdesign

And my poster prints and more in my Etsy Shop:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PomGraphicDesign

Find me on FACEBOOK | TWITTER | WEBSITE | SOCIETY6  | PINTEREST | ETSY 

Copyright © 2013 Pom Graphic Design